Israeli commandos clash with Hezbollah in northeastern Lebanon
Israel launched its deepest ground strike into Lebanon today, claiming it had killed 10 Hezbollah guerrillas and captured five in the northeastern city of Baalbek, while nearby air strikes killed at least 15 civilians.
Israeli warplanes also attacked a Lebanese army base in south Lebanon, killing three soldiers, a security official said.
Hezbollah guerrillas hit back, firing at least 150 rockets at towns across northern Israel, wounding at least 17 people and killing one, Israeli police said.
Israel medics said one of the rockets hit near the town of Beit Shean, the deepest rocket strike into Israel so far. Witnesses in Israel also reported that a Hezbollah rocket hit the West Bank for the first time, striking between the villages of Fakua and Jalboun, near Beit Shean.
The ferocity of the battles in Baalbek and across southern Lebanon, coupled with the determination of the Israelis to keep fighting and the minimal diplomatic progress toward a ceasefire so far, all indicated the three-week-old war is likely to escalate further.
In the most recent blow to diplomatic efforts, France said it will not participate in a meeting tomorrow at the UN that could send troops to help monitor a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, even though it may join – and possibly even lead – such a force.
France does not want to talk about sending peacekeepers until fighting halts and the UN Security Council agrees to a wider framework for lasting peace.
A reporter standing on a hilltop overlooking the Lebanese border town of Kfar Kila saw dozens of outgoing rockets fly overhead and across the Israeli border. Israeli artillery was returning fire, with a shell falling about every two minutes.
Hezbollah guerrillas said they landed a Khaibar-1 rocket near Beit Shean and Israel, which claims the rocket is Iranian-made, confirmed the hit.
Beit Shean is about 42 miles south of the Lebanese border.
A 52-year-old Israeli man riding his bicycle near the Israeli border town of Nahariya was killed by a rocket, medics said.
In the raid on Baalbek, near the eastern border with Syria, Israeli commandos flew in by helicopter. Israel’s army chief, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, said troops captured five Hezbollah guerrillas and killed at least 10.
Though Israel has not yet released the identity of those captured, when asked whether any were “big fish,” Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said: “They are tasty fishes.”
A Hezbollah spokesman confirmed Israeli troops captured “four or five” people, but said it was not at the hospital.
He denied they were Hezbollah fighters, saying one was a 60-year-old grocery store owner, and two others, the grocer’s relatives, work in construction.
Witnesses said Israeli forces partially destroyed the Dar al-Hikma hospital in Baalbek, where chief Hezbollah spokesman Hussein Rahal said fierce fighting raged for more than one hour.
Hezbollah used automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades and fought the commandos inside the Dar al-Hikma hospital, while Israeli jets attacked the surrounding guerrilla force with missiles, Rahal said.
Olmert said that although the scene of the fighting is called a hospital, “there are no patients there and there is no hospital. This is a base of the Hezbollah in disguise."
The hospital, which residents said is financed by an Iranian charity that is close to Hezbollah, was empty of patients at the time of the raid, the guerrilla group said.
“It was empty last night, there was no one there,” said the anonymous spokesman.
One of a series of air raids struck the village of Al Jamaliyeh, close to the hospital. A missile hit the house of the village’s mayor, Hussein Jamaleddin, instantly killing his son, brother, and five other relatives.
“Where is the press? Where is the media to see this massacre? Count our dead. Count our body parts,” Jamaleddin said minutes after the missile strike.
A family of seven – a mother, father and their five children – were killed in another air raid on an area near Al Jamaliyeh, witnesses said. A van driver was also killed when another missile struck nearby.
Fighting ended at about 4am (2am Irish time) as precarious calm prevailed in Baalbek, residents said.
In the separate attack on the Lebanese army, Israeli jets fired at least one missile on the base in the village of Sarba, in the Iqlim al Tuffah province, a highland region where Hezbollah is also believed to have offices and bases, said the security official.
The death of the three soldiers in the attack brings to 28 the number of Lebanese soldiers killed since the start of the Israeli offensive against Lebanon on July 12.
The Lebanese military has largely stayed out of the three-week-old conflict, though has said it will fight if Israel launches a wide-scale invasion, and Israeli warplanes have repeatedly attacked soldiers. It was not clear what prompted the airstrike on the army base.
In an incident denied by the Israeli military, Hezbollah said in a statement that it had attacked an Israeli army armoured unit that crossed into Lebanon this morning, destroying two tanks and leaving their crews dead or wounded.
As the fighting escalated throughout yesterday and today, thousands of Israeli troops were operating all along the Israel-Lebanon border, with additional soldiers crossing into Lebanon on Tuesday, Israeli defence officials said.
They entered through four different points along the border and progressed at least four miles inside Lebanon. Thousands of reservists, called up over the weekend, also were gathering at staging areas on the Israeli side of the border, ready to join the battles and extend the range of the invasion.
The Israelis want to keep Hezbollah off the border so their patrols and civilians along the fence are not in danger of attack, such as the July 12 raid in which guerrillas killed three soldiers and seized two others. The army also hopes to push Hezbollah far enough north so that most of the guerrillas’ rockets cannot reach the Jewish state.
In announcing the expanded operation, Israeli officials said their soldiers were to go as far as the Litani, about 18 miles from the border, and hold the ground until an international peacekeeping force comes ashore.
In Geneva, the UN’s World Food Programme said Israel had agreed to permit two oil tankers to sail into Lebanon to ease a growing fuel crisis in the country.
At least 542 Lebanese have been killed, including 468 civilians and 28 Lebanese soldiers and at least 46 Hezbollah guerrillas. The health minister says the toll could be as high as 750, including those still buried in rubble or missing. Fifty-five Israelis have died – 36 soldiers as well as 19 civilians killed in Hezbollah rocket attacks.
The United Nations also warned that the longer a spill of 110,000 barrels of oil is not cleaned up from Lebanon’s coast, the more severe the environmental impact will be. The oil spilled two weeks ago after Israeli warplanes hit a coastal power plant.
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